Do LLMs need leadership or management?

Mikko Ahonen argues that working with large language models (LLMs) requires both leadership and management, with leadership defining the long-term vision (WHAT) and management organizing resources (WHO and WHEN), while expertise addresses the HOW. The distinction matters for teams of people or LLMs, as all elements are necessary for successful collaboration.

Is working with LLMs more like leadership https://allen.bargi.org/notes/working-with-ai-feels-like-leadership/ or more like management https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/prompting-is-managing ? The words management and leadership are used to convey many kinds of meaning, so it is important to elaborate carefully what we mean when we say that “working with LLMs is more like <x ”. For me, one of the most important aspects of leadership is having a long-term vision, and being able to communicate it. In other words, it answers the question of WHAT. One of the most important aspects of management is being able to organize resources to materialize that vision. In other words, it answers the questions of WHO and WHEN. We still need to answer the question of HOW – which require the expertise – when building software, we are talking about architecture, implementation and subject-matter expertise. All of these elements are necessary when doing anything – even alone – but become even more important when you need more resources than one person – be it a team of people or a team of LLMs. If you need consulting related to system architectures in general, or LLMs or data integrations in particular, please do not hesitate to contact Mikko Ahonen through the contact page.